Solved Vista 64 home - advanced boot menu gone, can't restore from recovery disk

[kad153]

Appreciate any help anyone can give me here.

Turned off my PC this afternoon, with no problems that I was aware of. Turned it back on when I got home tonight. System hangs with a blank screen during normal boot. Power off and try f8 to go into safe mode - and now all of a suddon f8 brings up a boot menu with my dvd and dvd rw-drives and my hard drive, and not the advanced boot options it always did before. Cant get to safe mode, can't get to a system restore option or a command prompt or anything.

Now I'm getting a bit worried, and figure I'll break out my recovery disk. I have a cyberpower, inc. recovery dvd-rom that came with the pc - but no matter which of my drives I put it into (dvd rom or dvd-rw) and no matter which drive I boot from, the system goes to a black screen and just hangs.

I can press delete when the PC starts to enter setup, but thats my bios and there doesnt seem to be anything I can do there. f8 gets me to this dumb boot menu instead of advanced boot options (is this some kind of crazy virusb, or I am just going insane here?). No idea what to do now. Please help!

 

[stoneys-nutz]

Hello kad153,
When you get to the boot menu, high light the HDD your OS is on and press enter, that should bring up the options you are looking for, choose "Last Known Good Configuration".

If it still wont start follow this tutorial.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/141820-create-recovery-disc.html

Then this tutorial.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html

Hope this helps, good luck and post your results.

 

[kad153]

Thanks for the reply, although no luck. I followed the instructions and highlighted my hard disk and selected it from the boot menu - system hangs with a blank, black screen. I then followed the tutorial and created a recovery disk (I actually did this last night after posting) and followed the steps. This one at least seems to be recognized by the pc at bootup, as opposed to the recovery DVD that came with the pc that is just ignored. I can get to the menu with the startup repair option, and those others, and here is how each worked out:
Install Vista - doesn't work, as you would guess because I don't have vista on the recovery disk
Repair your computer - finds windows after a while, and gives me a new list of options:
Startup Repair - could not detect a problem when i run it. So nothing here
System Restore and Compete PC Restore - could not find any restore points
Windows Memory Diagnostic - both options require a restart and neither seem to work when the pc restarts.
Command prompt - this one works and takes me to a command prompt. I can change directory to my c: and i ran chkdsk and chkdsk /f, which found nothing. There was another command i saw someone post, but it said it required elevated command line access in the forums, which I can't seem to get without being able to boot into vista. I also tried Scandisk. no luck.

Any thoughts or help are greatly, greatly appreciated.

On other strange thing (or maybe I just never noticed it before and I'm reading into all this). When I tried to run chkdsk /f, i got a message that the volume was in use by another process that I had to dismount first, and after I did that it said all open handles are now invalid. I had no idea what this meant but i paid attention during my next boot up and i see a quick message for about .2 seconds on boot that says 'detecting array...' Now, maybe I just never paid attention before and this has always been there, but I don't have RAID on this computer, and don't ever remember seeing that before. Is it possible somehow that some virus or something screwed up one of my startup files? Is there a way to view or edit any of these just from a command line, since that's all I have? Or can I boot into Vista after running that chkdsk and unmounting the volume in use from a command line (I use to be able to type Win on like 3.1 or an old version). Thanks.

 

[stoneys-nutz]

Go to the command prompt and type sfc/scannow press enter, let it scan, and post the results.

 

[kad153]

/sfc scannow was that other command I mentioned above that I saw someone else on the forums recommend, so I tried doing last night as well. It gave me a permission error of some kind after running for a while, and that's why I asked above about elevated access.

I will try again, and edit this post with exactly what it says, but it did not work yesterday

The message I get is 'Windows Resource Protection could not start the repair service'. Any idea what I can do now? Also, my advanced startup options that use to let me boot in safemode have disappeared, and I what about this array thing? Are these deadends?

 

[stoneys-nutz]

Take a look at this tutorial, it will show you how to rebuild/repair the Master Boot Record, if this is damaged or corrupt you wont be able to boot to Vista.

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/204930-bootmgr-missing.htmlhttp://www.vistax64.com/general-dis...e-cant-restore-recovery-disk.html#post1275820

 

[kad153]

Stoneys-nutz,

You link is directing me back to this post, not to a specific tutorial. I'll look myself, but in case there is a specific one you want me to go to, please re-post.

Thanks.

Also, as I've mentioned I can get to the command prompt, and thus regedit and a number of other windows files (although I cannot run msconfig because I don't have admin permissions?) Any thoughts on how I can either get the right permission thought the command line only and/or use some of these files to fix my issue?

Phil

 

[stoneys-nutz]

The above link is fixed.

 

[kad153]

Followed the instructions in that tutorial to the letter. Everything seemed to go smoothly (it detected an instance of Windows at one point, which seemed to be a problem for another person).

However, after rebooting, same blank screen hang. I then went back in and tried the following commands
/fixboot
/fixmbr
/rebuildbcd - all seemed to work, but didn't have an effect.

The last command I noted in that thread - D:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force does not work - I get a bootsect.exe is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file message.

So I thought I was back to square 1, but then I restarted my PC - AND IT STARTED! No idea what exactly worked, but something did. Thank you so much for all the help.

 

[stoneys-nutz]

Glad you got it sorted, good luck.